You’d think with technology these days that ordering a magazine subscription for a Christmas gift would be really simple and really easy. Apparently though when you use Quality Magazines that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Yet again this year the above company have managed to balls up not one but two magazine subscriptions in exactly the same way they did last year for a gift to my mum from my father.

As a regular reader of Good Housekeeping my mum loves the magazine and so this year decided to get a subscription for her sister and sister in law. I helped her place the order online even filling in the boxes to state that the item ‘was a gift’ and inputting a Christmas message….see it’s really obvious that it was a gift.

Orders duly placed and an email received informing my mum that the recipients would receive a lovely Christmas gift edition of the January 2014 of Good Housekeeping magazine. Simples….only it clearly isn’t.

Imagine to my mother’s surprise to visit her sister today to find that she had already received the magazine. Clearly Santa is busy this year and needed to get rid of a few early Christmas deliveries before Christmas Eve. Furthermore the magazine contained no note, no message and no indication as to who it was from.

Pretty pointless sending a gift to your sister if the company can’t relay the message with it or inform them of the sender. My mum’s sister was confused and somewhat embarrassed to have to ask my mum if she’d sent the gift and to say that my mum was less than impressed when phoning (the somewhat ironically named) Quality Magazines this afternoon would be a small understatement.

Although she was reassured that they were ‘terribly sorry’ at ballsing up the order again for the second year in a row they were only prepared to make the gesture of extending the subscription to April 2015.

So if you’re looking for the perfect Secret Santa gift this year then we’d highly recommend a magazine subscription from Quality Subscriptions as no one will guess who it’s from. If however you want a magazine subscription to be addressed to that special someone with a note so they know how much you care you may want to purchase elsewhere.